47.
What is this petition-writing woman’s name?” said Jane’s father.
“Why? What are we going to do to her, Dad?” said Dane. “Break her knees?”
“I’d bloody like to,” said Jane’s father. He held a tiny jigsaw piece up to the light and squinted at it. “Anyway, what sort of name is Amabella? Silly sort of a name. What’s wrong with Annabella?”
“You have got a grandson called Ziggy,” pointed out Dane.
“Hey,” said Jane to her brother. “It was your idea.”
Jane was at her parents’ place, sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea, eating biscuits and doing a jigsaw puzzle. Ziggy was asleep in Jane’s old bedroom. She was going to give him the day off school tomorrow, so they would stay the night and just hang around here in the morning. Renata and her friends would be happy.
Perhaps, thought Jane as she looked at her mother’s 1980s apricot-and-cream kitchen, she would never go back to Pirriwee. This was where she belonged. It had been a kind of madness moving so far away in the first place. Almost a sickness. Her motives had been warped and weird, and this was her punishment.
Here, Jane felt bathed in familiarity: the mugs, the old brown teapot, the tablecloth, the smell of home, and of course, the puzzle. Always the puzzles. Her family had been addicted to jigsaw puzzles for as long as Jane could remember. The kitchen table was never used for eating, only for the latest puzzle. Tonight they were beginning a new one Jane’s father had ordered online. It was a two-thousand-piece puzzle of an Impressionist painting. Lots of hazy swirls of color.
“Maybe I should move back over this way,” she said, seeing how it felt, and as she spoke she thought for some reason of Blue Blues, the smell of coffee, the sapphire-blue shimmer of the sea, and Tom’s wink as he handed over her takeout coffee, as if they were both in on a secret joke. She thought of Madeline holding up the roll of cardboard like a baton as she walked up the stairs of her apartment, and Celeste’s bobbing ponytail as they went on their morning walks around the headland, beneath the towering Norfolk pines.
She thought of the summer afternoons earlier in the year when she and Ziggy had walked straight from school to the beach, Ziggy taking off his school shoes and socks on the sand, peeling off his shorts and shirt and running straight into the ocean in his underpants, while she chased him with a tube of sunscreen and he laughed with joy as the white froth of a wave broke around him.
Recently, thanks to Madeline, she’d picked up two new lucrative local clients within walking distance of her flat: Pirriwee Perfect Meats and Tom O’Brien’s Smash Repairs. Their paperwork didn’t smell. (In fact, Tom O’Brien’s receipts smelled of potpourri.)
She realized with a shock that some of the happiest moments of her life had taken place over the last few months.
“But we actually do love living there,” she said. “Ziggy loves school too—well, he normally does.”
She remembered his tears earlier tonight. She couldn’t keep sending him to school with children who told him they weren’t allowed to play with him.
“If you want to stay, you stay,” said her father. “You can’t let that woman bully you into leaving the school. Why doesn’t she leave?”
“I cannot believe that Ziggy would be bullying her daughter,” said Jane’s mother, her eyes on the jigsaw pieces she was sliding rapidly back and forth on the table.
“The point is that she believes it,” said Jane. She tried to slot a piece into the bottom right-hand corner of the puzzle. “And now the other parents believe it too. And, I don’t know, I can’t say for sure that he didn’t do something.”
“That piece doesn’t go there,” said her mother. “Well, I can say for sure that Ziggy hasn’t done anything. He simply hasn’t got it in him. Jane, that piece does not go there, it’s part of the lady’s hat. What was I saying? Oh yes, Ziggy, I mean, my gosh, look at you, for example, you were the shyest little thing in school, wouldn’t say boo to anyone. And of course, Poppy had the sweetest nature—”
“Mum, Poppy’s nature isn’t relevant!” Jane gave up on the puzzle piece and threw it down. Her frustration manifested itself in a sudden burst of anger and irritability that she directed at her poor defenseless mother. “For heaven’s sake, Ziggy is not Poppy reincarnated! Poppy didn’t even believe in reincarnation! And the fact is, we don’t know what personality traits Ziggy might have inherited from his father, because Ziggy’s father was, his father was . . .”
She stopped herself just in time. Idiot.
There was a sudden stillness around the table. Dane looked up from where he’d been reaching across the table to slot in a puzzle piece.
“Darling, what are you saying?” Jane’s mother removed a crumb from the corner of her mouth with her fingernail. “Are you saying he . . . Did he hurt you?”
Jane looked around the table. Dane met her eyes with a question. Her mother tapped two fingers rapidly against her mouth. Her father’s jaw was clenched. There was an expression something like terror in his eyes.
“Of course not,” she said. When someone you loved was depending on your lie, it was perfectly easy. “Sorry! God, no. I didn’t mean that. I just meant that Ziggy’s biological father was basically a stranger. I mean, he seemed perfectly nice, but we don’t know anything about him, and I know that’s shameful—”
“I think we’ve all gotten over the shock of your hussy-like behavior by now, Jane,” said Dane deliberately. He wasn’t falling for the lie, she could tell. He didn’t need to believe it as badly as her parents did.
“We certainly have,” said Jane’s mother. “And I don’t care what sort of personality traits Ziggy’s biological father had, I know my grandson, and he is not and never will be a bully.”
“Absolutely not,” agreed Jane’s father. His shoulders sagged. He took a sip of his tea and picked up another jigsaw piece.
“And just because you don’t believe in reincarnation, missy”—Jane’s mother pointed at her—“doesn’t mean you can’t be reincarnated!”
Jonathan: When I first saw the playground at Pirriwee Public I thought it was amazing. All those secret little hideaways. But now I see that had its downside. All sorts of things were going on at that school out of sight and the teachers were clueless.